The Friday Post #51: Oranges, Octopuses and a Librarian Action Figure

In the Northeast, it’s been a scorcher of a week with record-breaking high temperatures. The sports world this week stood transfixed by the media spectacle of LeBron James and aFIFA World Cup final scheduled between Spain and the Netherlands for Sunday. Neither of these countries have ever reached the finals before.

Anyone who reads this blogs knows that I admire wily cephalopods. Enter Paul the Psychic Octopus, a handsome German mollusk with mightily predictive powers when it comes to calling winners. He correctly predicted the outcome of all six World Cup matches for the German team.

German fans were irate over that loss… and quite upset with Paul. There were even death threats against the cephalopod. Recipes for calamari were suggested. This all shows very poor taste and that the German fans are quite thin-skinned, I think.

Leave the poor guy alone – he has nine brains (one in his head, one in each of eight tentacles) for heavens’ sake and probably doesn’t even watch television. At any rate, he hasn’t been wrong in two years. He even has his own Facebook page.

Link here to a New York Times article (published at 8:05 am today) as Paul picks Spainas the winner on Sunday.

Dutch fans, meanwhile, can take heart from watching Mani the parakeet predicting that their teamwill prevail on Sunday afternoon. Stay tuned to watch the final outcome!